I wasn’t planning to do a Tweets Post at the moment. I’m working on a couple of other more substantial posts that are taking a lot of time. However, there are a few things I want to bring to your attention. They’re not Good Things. They’re WTF things.

As I’ve said before, I’m (very) slowly doing a post about John Bolton. I think Donald Trump is aware that bringing Bolton into the White House is increasing the impression that he’s a warmonger. Despite liking to be seen as the Ultimate Tough Guy, he’s not so keen on the moniker “warmonger”. It appears he’s doing something about it. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing when this came on my screen. This is what you get when you try and do the right thing and learn other points of view!

Trumpy Bear!

This, dear readers, is the ‘Trumpy Bear Official Commercial’. I thought this was going to turn out to be some sort of left-wing mockery of Trump. But no. It’s real!

Third Month Mania

A new video has come out from The Daily Show to encourage people to vote in the final of ‘Third Month Mania’. You can find my take on that here if you haven’t already read it. There are three days left to vote, so be quick. It only takes a few seconds, and you can vote here.

Some Americans are Ignorant and Proud: Flat Earth Edition

This is a YouTube channel I’ve just found: Some Americans are Ignorant and Proud. This is video #127, so they’ve been around a while. I watched a couple of their other videos and I think they’re pretty funny, but I may have a warped sense of humour.

This recent video is dedicated to flat-earthers. Take note of the guy from around 3.30 on, who uses a model plane and globe to demonstrate “… the simplest irrefutable flat earth truth.” He earlier declares that everything he learnt in school after the sixth grade was a waste of time.

There’s some good stuff from Neil deGrasse Tyson in there too, especially right at the end.

Some memes you’ve probably all seen before …

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Education Tweets

In honour of the stupid theme, here’s a tweet of mine.

The real reason the GOP don’t want to raise teacher wages. (Did you ever notice that the worst education rates are in red states?!) pic.twitter.com/61sHujbIM7

Trump says he didn’t know about Cohen’s hush money to Stormy Daniels. And he didn’t know about his Don Jr.’s meeting with Russians to get dirt on Clinton. And he didn’t know about WikiLeaks. This is now devolved to, “What didn’t the president know, and when didn’t he know it.”

Mueller Time Tweets

An update …
(Via Ann German.)

“Armed with subpoenas compelling electronic records and sworn testimony, Mueller’s team showed up unannounced at the home of the business associate, who was a party to multiple transactions connected to Trump’s effort to expand his brand abroad”https://t.co/yyxN7KcYOu

Human Rights Tweets

A man got a rejection slip for his manuscript from a female publisher. He went berserk on Twitter, deciding there was #MisandryInPublishing. There’s a pic of one of his tweets in this tweet:
(Via Ann German.)

You may think this belongs in the Political Tweets section, but I want to separate it from politics in the way John Pavlovitz has. This is about something much deeper and more important. The Trump presidency is doing enormous damage to the fabric of US society. The divisions were already there before Trump became president, but now they’re laid bare. I urge you all to read the article in the link of this tweet. In fact, to make it easier, just click here.
(Via Ann German.)

“It’s about my grief at the ugliness you feel emboldened to post on social media now, the nastiness you seem newly capable of, the disgusting words you now so easily toss out around the dinner table.”#SaturdayMorninghttps://t.co/jC5F0GcIdq

It amazes me sometimes how relaxed some wildlife can be around people. This kookaburra just sat on my fence as I took a close up on my iPhone. Calm as anything it really is nice having such great wildlife in the burbs. pic.twitter.com/O1e1P09JBZ

40 Responses to “A Miscellany of Stupid (plus Tweets)”

The mushroom is a “Bleeding tooth fungus”, Hydnellum peckii. They used to be used as a traditional dye.

And I see the History Lovers Club stuffed up again. I don’t recall any other lover of history being so generally careless about context, period, attribution, or truth. Great shot. But it’s not “colorised”, and it’s not 1930s. Best I can tell it is shot in Kodachrome in 1949 by the delightfully named Chalmers Butterfield. But it is London, so at least they are doing better than those who think it is a shot of 1930s New York.

Definitely a young Hydnellum, aka strawberry and cream, bleeding tooth or devil’s tooth, but not necessarily peckii (although most probable, due to the smooth top surface, I’m not enough of a mycologist to be confident there) Hydnellum diabolus or H. pinecola are not excluded. When older they lose the drops and become indistinct. Mainly found in North America and Europe. They live in mutualistic symbiosis with (particularly) conifer trees. They are not toxic, but considered ‘inedible’, because very bitter. That photograph is very beautiful and clearly shows the little spikes where the spores are.

It’s really worrying. Just as with religion, there seems to be this really strong appeal of and to authority, and if that authority is combined with charisma, reality and thinking for yourself go out the window.

Wow! So that’s a kookaburra! I finally found out after all these years! When I was a little kid of 8 or 9 we sang a little song in school:

Kookaburra sits on the old gum tree, merry merry king of the bush is he. Laugh, kookaburra, laugh kookaburra, great your life must be!

Kookaburra sits on the old gum tree, eating all the gumdrops he can see. Stop, kookaburra, stop, kookaburra! Leave some there for me!

I haven’t thought of that song in decades! Thanks for the Blast from the Past.

I wish I could see a kangaroo up close. Are they only in Australia or do you have them in New Zealand, too?

Now, about the pussy cat and the plastic bags…there is a human bean present and paying attention. Okay.

My wonderful late black cat Jinx somehow found a plastic bag and stuck his head through one of the handles.

He panicked. That poor cat was terrified! He went tearing through the house with that awful and mysterious thing flapping on his neck. He was totally scared to death. I finally caught up with him when he ran into a corner upstairs. I held him down while he struggled like mad, and I got that damn bag off him.

I’m glad I was home when this happened. If he’d gotten snagged on something he might have thrashed around in a way that inadvertently tightened that handle around his neck and strangled him.

So on the one hand the video is cute. OTOH I was careful after that to keep plastic bags and cats separated.

We used to sing the kookaburra song at school too, and I remembered it as well. That’s why I put that tweet in even though it’s not a great shot. We don’t have them in NZ.

I thought about those handles on the plastic bags as well, and I’m glad the staff were supervising. I wasn’t going to put it in because of that, but the acrobatic leaps were so impressive I couldn’t resist.

Trumpy Bear, are you sure it is not a parody, wasn’t it posted the first of April? I cannot believe it is serious. Toe-cringingly embarrassing. Same for the Flat Earthers, I think many of them know the Earth is a spheroid, but they are just trying to attract some attention to themselves. BTW, Cats are indeed definitive and irrefutable proof the Earth is not flat.

I’m not so sure about that. I think most, if not all, believe it’s flat. It’s no more bizarre than believing in a god into adulthood, or denying evolution, and billions do that despite all the evidence.

Well I think there are three kinds of flat Earthers: 1- The religious literalists. According to the Bible the Earth is flat, so it is. They are impervious to evidence other than their particular chosen scripture. 2 – The ones who do not take it (flat Earth) seriously and just like to see how far they can get away with nonsense. Those are the ones I consider ‘attention seekers’. 3 – The mad crew, who possibly overdosed on psychodysleptics, don’t like the world as is, believe in all kinds of new age woo and go for all kind of conspiracy theories, the ‘bonkers’ category.

I think there’s a fourth kind who really believe in their version of the “science”. They think there’s a great conspiracy to hide the truth, though to what end I can’t imagine. When Obama was president, a quarter of Republicans genuinely believed he was the Anti-Christ. These people get in their information silos, they support and reinforce each other and talk themselves into their ideas.

For us, it’s impossible to believe that people could really think that stuff, but they do. Watch some of the videos people like Alex Jones (InfoWars) put out. Check out the Right Wing Watch site. You will find them. Remember how big the US is, and these people can live largely isolated from main stream ideas. They won’t watch the usual media. Some even think much of Fox is too left wing. They genuinely believe that Trump is president through God’s will. They think we’re in the Biblical End Times and they’ll be raptured. Some atheists set up a company to look after their pets after they were gone and made a fair bit of money, though I think they were done for fraud because the sheriff didn’t believe in the Rapture. There’s a series of books called the Left Behind series about people who aren’t raptured that’s sold tens of millions of copies and made its Rapture-believing writers a huge amount of money.

It reminds me of the famous Asimov quote: “John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.”

Note, it could be argued that misandry might kill too, albeit on a very much smaller scale -and not really established. Males whose careers and reputations are ruined (Third wave feminism and ‘dear colleague’ letters come to mind) might become more prone to suicide, and we know that males, particularly white males, already are kinda prone to suicide. Note, AFAIK it has never been established that a victim of dubious accusations ever committed suicide. My point is just that misandry is likely to be more than “A woman hurt my feelings”. And for all clarity, I do not equate misogyny with misandry, see Asimov’s “The Relativity of Wrong” I just posted.

There was not even a word “mimisandry” until quite recently. The word misogyny has been around for much longer. I read a really good analysis why once, which I wish I could remember. It was something about men controlling language and them not even considering men could be hated, but that women could (be hated). It wasn’t until women began to get more power that it was invented – by men. The initial idea was that women wanting power hated men. It never occurred to them at that early stage that not wanting men to have all the power might be a legitimate complaint – it was just misandry.

I can agree there, it definitely started like that, but I also think there really is some misandry here and there now. The ‘check your privilege thing’, uttered by some that are highly privileged themselves -and blind to that fact- is a case in point. I advise them to take a tour in a ‘middle class’ (lower class) household in post-war Europe, say eg. a gravediggers home. The wage goes -sometimes minus some minor pocket money- to the wife, who necessarily reigns the household. The one who cleans the floor can say: ‘take off your shoes’. In my youth I’ve seen quite a few strong women, who reigned with a close to iron fist, I’d say out of necessity, since the means were very meagre. Again, not in upper middle class families, but in lower middle class families, where not having to get up at four in the morning to start digging graves was indeed considered a privilege. (The kind of environment where education, and educating yourself, was the only way out). Having lived in some of these families, the second and even more the third wave of feminism always struck me as a battle by the privileged few. Don’t get me wrong, I do think feminism has done a wealth of good, but the second and especially the third wave have always appeared to me to live in a very small and closed (and privileged) universe.

As an illustration, these feminists contend that boys are ‘socialised’ with toy guns and toy trucks, while girls are ‘socialised’ with dolls (barbie dolls!) and toy kitchenware/toy tea-sets. No, number one got a (very sexist) box of paint and -if lucky- the second one got a (equally sexist) doll or teddy bear. Numbers three to x (sometimes ten) often got nothing at all.

After the big raid on Cohen today, we are off to the races on the news channels tonight. Good luck keeping up with this one. Only thing I get so far is that Trump’s lawyer, Cohen is in deep trouble. You have to already have some very heavy stuff on the guy to do this kind of a raid.

Mostly what I learned watching MSNBC shows is this raid was actually done by the NEW YORK attorney general’s office, not Mueller’s office. So the state is very much involved with this one. Trump was totally unhinged, ranting about Mueller and should he fire Mueller, and he was not the guy who even did this. Cohen is likely going to go up the river, as we say, for fraud, campaign difficulties and who knows what. His days as a lawyer for Trump or anyone else are over, so Trump is kind of running out of lawyers. This guy never really was an attorney, he was Trump’s fixer and a thug.

Yes, apparently it was Geoffrey Berman, a federal judge acting on request of the US Attorney of the Southern District of New York (if I got that right), who ordered the seizure, I’m not sure it actually involves Mueller. Apparently nobody believes that, Mr Trump in the first place, so it probably is true that Mueller is not involved. I hope they had good reasons and will find some real incriminating evidence, if not Mr Trump will be vindicated. In a paranoia moment I think that might even be the aim of the exercise, after all, Mr Berman was appointed by Mr Trump, if I’m not mistaken.

On a tangent, I do hope Mr Trump will not be impeached. i mean he’s so erratic and unhinged: “not even evil”, if I’m allowed to paraphrase. But some of the people in Mr Trump’s crew are definitely evil, Mr Pence in the first place. When he was nominated as VP I speculated Mr Trump chose him as an insurance against left wing assassination attempts. But it goes deeper than that, it is also a kind of barrier to Impeachment. There are some other evil elements spooking apart from Mr Pence: Mr Bolton, Mr Pompeo, Mr Pruitt and many others, but above all, Mr McConnell. One may only hope that the interim elections this year will see a land-slide disabling the Republicans, but that is far from certain.

Yep. Mueller found something illegal, and handed it over to the local office as it was not part of his purview. The DC lawyer was actually interviewed by Trump, which is highly unusual. It’s not something presidents should do, obviously because they should keep themselves separate from legal stuff.

Trump went on about them breaking into Cohen’s office etc, which is an outrageous statement. They had a legal warrant, signed by a judge. So, again obviously, they must have probable cause.

And Trump was still going on about Hillary, and Democratic plots, and all sorts of other things that have been found to be nothing.

Here is another little legal twist on the raid of Cohen. When Trump said, while on the airplane the other day, No, to the question, did you know about the payment to Daniels? When he verified what Cohen had already said much earlier – the attorney client thing is dead. You can whip up all non disclosure agreements but if your client confirms what you have already said, that you know nothing about any $130,000 you do not have a client. Cohen was thrown under the bus. But then Trump has lots of guys doing that.

Well , I guess that Cohen is a kinda guy who deserves some ‘underbussing’. I also guess in a sense the most deserving ‘underbussing’ candidate threw himself under it. Twice, first by admitting why he fired Mr Comey, and now by -probably unintentionally- allowing Mr Cohen to speak out, since no more ‘client discretion privilege’ (or whatever it is called). Interesting times, ne?

Cohen gave an interview to Don Lemon yesterday. I haven’t seen all the actual interview, but he apparently talked about how much this is affecting his family. If it comes to a choice between Trump and his family, I suspect there’s a good chance he’ll pick his wife and kids. That’s similar to how Mueller got Michael Flynn to confess – he chose his son over Trump.

So now you have the Comey book to add. What chaos and Trump has circled his staff at Fox news, the Inquirer, and what is left at the White House to go full out on evil Comey. We may be getting closer to the end of the Trump presidency than we think. He admits now that he has no guts and will not talk to Mueller’s team. Instead we will wait to see what Mueller does to finish this guy off. Reports to his boss are expected soon, starting with the obstruction charges. More to follow. For all of the doubters out there, get your forks out. But the herd of loyal liberals out there who still think the Trump train will somehow save him persist.

I agree. When all this latest stuff comes out properly, Trump’s base cannot save him. People like Hannity, Jesse Watters, and Judge Jenine are looking increasingly ridiculous. More and more Fox hosts are stepping back from the brink. Shepherd Smith was never on it. Those sticking up for Trump on other networks where they’re getting proper questions either don’t answer the question asked or are incoherent.

I think this revelation that Cohen taped conversations is interesting. I bet it was so he could play them back for Trump so Trump could get a thrill hearing the person being cowed by bully-boy Cohen.

It does worry me that Trump has been very effective at building his brand with up to a quarter of the population. He’s got those same people to distrust quality media outlets and the FBI.

Mueller has been very clever passing the Cohen part of the investigation to SDNY. That makes it a state crime. Trump, of course, won’t be able to pardon him. The only thing Trump can do to retain his loyalty is pay him, and since the prosecutors have all the evidence, I’m not sure pleading the Fifth will help. Also (as you probably know), apparently in a civil case, the jury is allowed to assume that the alleged perpetrator is pleading the Fifth because they’re guilty.

And now Mr Hannity appears to be one of three clients of Mr Cohen last year (the others being Mr Trump and Mr Broidy -a Trump campaign donor who used Mr Cohen to ‘buy off’ a child with a model). Now what does Mr Hannity have to hide to need the services of Mr Cohen (the ‘fixer’, who modeled himself on the despicable Mr Cohn)? And thinking of hiding, I wonder what Mr Trump is hiding, no tax returns, not seriously distancing himself from his business interests when he became president and every time an investigation comes close to his business, he goes berserk apoplectic. Is it -Russian or other-mafia money laundering? Is he not a billionaire at all, but living from oligarchs handouts? And what for? Is there something else? Drug trafficking? Running a prostitution/human trafficking network? Or what could it be that even Mr Trump knows he can’t get away with? It must be something very serious.

Cohen is spoken of in the Steele documents in detail as going to Prague, meeting with the Russians and cleaning up for Manafort who had recently been let go from the campaign. So anyway, Cohen makes this big appearance on Hannity’s show to let everyone know he had never been to Prague so that proves the Steele documents were garbage. He waved his passport around as proof he had not gone to Prague. Now we have evidence that yes, he did go to Prague and Mueller and company are working out the rest of the evidence. He went by train from Germany into Prague (Passport not needed). If they pin this one down, Trump is yesterday’s breakfast and this is the collusion story.